How Beautiful We Were(112)

During my days at the school, I wrote to Thula about what I was learning, the conversations I was having with my classmates. I told her about all the ways my being in government could help villages like Kosawa. What the country needed was a government made of people like us, those who had suffered the consequences of bad policies and knew how things ought to be. We needed a leader who would put citizens first, place all businesses under state ownership. We needed to direct all funds from exports into the nation’s coffers. If we put in measures to prevent the coffers from being pinched, they would eventually overflow. We would use our abundant wealth for healthcare, for education, jobs creation. There was no reason why citizens should lack when the country had bauxite to the north, oil to the west, timber to the east. With a visionary leader, a prosperous country was possible. Wasn’t it evident, I asked her, that good government was the solution to the ills of our nation? I told her I believed we could do it, our generation. We could be the ones to uplift and equalize, no citizen greater or lesser than another. We could create a beautiful country. But first we had to wait our turn; the older generation’s turn was not over yet. Our current leaders were men for whom the word “change” elicited chuckles, but there wasn’t much we could do to force them and their archaic mentalities out, we had to wait for their eras to end. The past would soon be gone, and the future would be ours to design.



Thula did not dismiss my hope, though she said it was unlikely a country like ours would transition effortlessly from a wretched government to an upright one. She said our nation did not have the foundation for such a progression, because it lacked a constitution; what every country needed was a declaration made by the people, all the people, about what sort of country they wished to live in so that they could build it together. If you look at countries with a history of stable governments, she wrote, you’ll see that they have solid foundations created by those who came before them. The Americans are standing on a foundation created by their founding fathers. European monarchs created foundations for the kinds of countries their descendants would live in. Who created a foundation for our country? No one. We were different tribes thrown together with no common dream. We were forced to build upon sinking sand, and now we’re crumbling from within.



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Despite my sister’s wariness, I harbored hopes during my years at the leadership school for what I would do in government. My classmates were like me, convinced that we would never be corruptible like the older generation, determined to hold steadfast to the ideal that the emphasis on the title “civil servant” should be on the second word.

It did not take me long to realize, after I began working, that my hopes would not come to be. I could see, even from my first day of balancing budgets, that the past and the future of our country would be identical. Repeatedly, I was told my job was to clean up numbers, not to ask questions about why large sums of money could not be accounted for. When I asked what would happen if the deficit was discovered, I was told that the problem was for another day—my responsibility was to worry about the present.



I learned, within my first year after leadership school, that political theories and their applications existed in separate realms. And that Thula was right—ours was a country with no foundation upon which a better country could be rebuilt. I slowly began to accept, just like my colleagues, that, ultimately, we had to do whatever suited us best. Only I didn’t know in those days what suited me best. I didn’t know what I really wanted.

Nubia knew what she wanted—five children who would one day study in America, health and prosperity, happiness for herself, for me, for our families. The country meant nothing to her. What good is this country to anyone? she asked me often. In our school days, I used to argue that the country stood a chance if we gave it a chance. Then I went into government and realized that no one in my office, from my lowest-ranking colleague to my biggest boss, gave the country a chance. They diverted all the money they could into private accounts, took whatever supplies their children needed for school, sent the office driver to chauffeur their wives around town, came to work as late as they could, left as early as they wished, because they deemed themselves entitled. My classmates from the leadership school, when we got together, laughed about the impunity, how much worse it was than they’d expected, but in the best possible way. I refused to join in. For years I worked and collected just my salary because I believed in my sister’s dream, because I believed it only took one upright man to remake the world. But I knew my salary would never afford Nubia and me a life of great comfort. Many nights, I considered the ways in which I was failing my wife and future children for the sake of a better country.



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By the time Liberation Day came, I’d spent years helping Thula with her mission, and Nubia had spent many evenings alone at home, because she understood that I longed to support my sister, and nothing was more sacred to her than familial love. She still thought it all futile, Thula’s fight, which was why when I told her, a couple of months after Liberation Day, that I was ready to let Kosawa go, she kissed me and told me she was ready for us to start anew.



I’d traveled across the country with my sister, I’d borne witness to how little was changing despite her zeal, and I’d realized—while some men were heckling Thula at a poorly attended rally in the east—that my Nubia was right all along: our nation was decaying with us inside it, all one could do was abscond with whatever one could. But we’re not absconding, Nubia likes to say, we’re only taking what’s ours; we have the right to do so. She calls herself the Great Bitch, my beloved. She speaks in an American accent and prefers European fashion designers for both of us. For me she’s done whatever a bitch needs to do to get her man what she believes he’s entitled to.